Netflix Offers AppleTV Competitor

Today Netflix, Inc, the nation's most popular online DVD rental service, announced the first Netflix ready device in a series of more to come. The Netflix Player by Roku, as they're calling it, is availabel immediately and will provide over 10,000 movies to Netflix subscribers instantly to their TVs.

This is clearly a product that is aimed at the AppleTV which allows users to rent and download movies from its popular iTunes Store. The immediate clear difference between the two products is the large number of offerings (10,000 with Netflix, and less than 1000 movies from iTunes) and the cost of the two devices. Roku is offering their device for $99 whereas the AppleTV starts at $229. Naturally, I would be the first to agree with anyone that says you are getting a lot more from the AppleTV than you would be from the Roku device, such as home networking capabilities, network music and photo sharing, as well as the Apple name, support, and design. However, I'm thrilled to see this product as it is really the first of its kind to offer a low-cost option for online streams of movies and TV without the need for any kind of individual physical medium such as DVDs or Blu-Ray discs.

Another notable difference is that the Roku device claims the content is "near" DVD-quality, compared to that of Apple's soon-to-be-released HD versions of their movies.

I've been telling folks and friends that I think we have seen the end of physical format wars and that the future is online downloadable content. For you will no longer have to rebuild your entire collection with the latest high-quality tape/disc. This announcement from Netlfix was the next step we needed to push our home entertainment choices into the next century more quickly.